As we all know, better organization on our hard drive leads to improved speed, performance and reliability. However, some advanced partition management is still unavailable with the windows built-in disk partition manager. So third-party partition manager software is still a great need. If you’re still hunting for a free, all-in-one software for hard driver management and disk partition, the newly released AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition from Aomei Technology is a nice choice.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition (formerly Home Edition) is a versatile partition solution and disk management freeware that offers pretty much all features the average user would need to manage their disks and partitions. The term “Home” was dropped in favor of “Standard” because the new edition is now completely free for both Private and Commercial Use. Therefore, common users can still use it to acquire more advantages in disk partition management field, while professionals could also use it in their small company or to help others solve partition problems, without the need to buy a license.

Based on most users’ feedbacks, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition 5.5 not only fixes the previous bugs perfectly, but also has more new features and functions added, some of which are chargeable in many other disk partition software. With its magic features, you can resize/move, create, delete, format partition, align partition, convert NTFS to FAT32 partition and vise versa, hide partitions, copy/clone disk and partition, convert GPT to MBR or MBR to GPT, wipe hard drive/partition, repartition hard drive without losing data or corruption, Migrate OS to SSD etc. (However, we still recommend you first backup your important data to an external hard drive before you operate the partition).

The more attractive operation is the built-in step by step Wizard Guides which allow you to quickly and easily finish complex operations including copying partition, cloning entire hard disk, Extend Partition, Convert NTFS to FAT32, etc. All thanks to the stable partition recovery wizard, the lost and deleted partition is not your problem any more. The OS migration wizard empowers you to migrate OS to another hard disk including SSD and HDD without reinstalling OS and applications. Burn Partition Assistant into bootable CD/DVD or USB device, and boot from bootable device to manage hard drive, thus you can conveniently manage a mass of computers without directly install the software on these machines. Or when your current OS fails to boot, you could boot from bootable device to manage your hard drive to repair the problems. Moreover, with the newly added Windows To Go Creator wizard, you can install your customized Windows 8 or 8.1 on removable USB flash drives and external hard drives to boot it from any computer on which you want to use Windows 8 or 8.1. You don’t have to buy Windows 8 Enterprise Edition to create a Windows To Go USB drive.

On the other hand, AOMEI Partition Assistant has no support to create Linux-based bootable disk. Although WinPE bootable disk is more powerful and has better hardware compatibility and better software stability than Linux bootable disk, creating WinPE bootable media requires to download Windows AIK (Automated Installation Kit) which is approximately 1.7 GB in size and may take up to a few hours depending on transmission rate. So it would be nice if we could use Linux-based bootable instead if we do not want to download Windows AIK. Moreover, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition can only work on basic disk. If you need manage dynamic disk, or more advanced features you will need to pay a license for the the more advanced edition, include: professional edition, server edition, unlimited edition and tech edition.

Overall, as a personal experience with this tool, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition is an excellent (if not the best) freeware disk partition utility. It’s highly recommended for all users, and especially those with multidisk systems.

Warning: Modifying your disk partition is inherently dangerous and can result in data loss or system unbootable if something goes wrong. So use the programs at your own risk and be sure to always have a backup of your data and have a Windows installation disk available.